Friday Forecast

March 14, 2025

Welcome to the March issue of our Friday Forecast. The Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program (ALPP) and the Animal Law & Policy Clinic (ALPC) team is pleased to share the following updates and events with you.

Animal Law Week 2025 Recap

ALPP and the Harvard Animal Law Society (HALS) held the annual Animal Law Week at Harvard Law School last week. Approximately 375 individuals attended our five panels. The week opened and closed with explorations of humans’ use of birds and other animals, from a Monday afternoon discussion of the pandemic potential of avian influenza to a candid conversation on Friday about the impacts of corporate and government policies on poultry farming in the U.S. The talks on the days in between covered solutions for endangered wildlife, animal festivals, and careers in animal law. Those unable to attend any of these panels in real time or wishing to rewatch any of them can find the recordings here.

We are grateful to the many people who contributed to making this Animal Law Week so informative and dynamic, including our guest speakers and moderators, the HALS Board, and the ALPP and ALPC team. We are also grateful for the many dedicated attendees for making time for these important conversations and for engaging with challenging questions about how humans can improve the treatment of animals through the legal system.

HALS President Lla Anderson ’25 introducing Craig Watts and Amanda Hitt for the panel entitled “Full Disclosure: Poultry Farmer Speaks Out Amid Potential Policy Collapse and Evolving Threats to American Farmers.”

Monday: ALPP Research Fellow Bonnie Nadzam engaged with Ann Linder, Research Scholar with the Law, Environment & Animals Program at Yale Law School, Tufts University’s Dr. Jonathan Runstadler and Dr. Wendy Puryear, and NPR’s William Stone in a discussion of the science of avian influenza and its spread among wildlife, media coverage of outbreaks, and federal policy responses. Watch the recording here.

Tuesday: ALPC Faculty Director Professor Mary Hollingsworth moderated a compelling conversation with leading wildlife attorneys, Erica Fuller and Ramona McGee, who shared their insights on protecting some of the world’s most endangered species and on navigating challenges in a changing legal landscape. Watch the recording here.

Wednesday: Elizabeth MeLampy ’21 discussed her soon-to-be released first book, Forget the Camel (Apollo 2025), with ALPP Faculty Director Professor Kristen Stilt, who had the opportunity to read an advance copy. Their exchange raised illuminating questions, explored themes revealed in the book, such as what value animal festivals hold for humans and what different kinds of festivals (e.g., the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race or Groundhog Day) reveal about human values, and probed the complex intersection of animal welfare and cultural tradition. Watch the recording here.

Thursday: HALS President Lla Anderson ’25 moderated a rich exchange with animal law professionals Tené Johnson, Alysson Gambardella ’24, Melissa Alpert ’17, and Isabella Nilsson ’24, who shared their career journeys and ideas for ways students and activists can champion animal welfare and rights in myriad settings, from non-profit advocacy to private practice and much more. Watch the recording here.

Friday: Amanda Hitt, champion for food system whistleblowers, and Craig Watts, a former contract chicken farmer, shared a candid and informative exchange, educating participants on the realities for poultry growers and their complex relationships with the birds they raise, American consumers, and the corporations and subsidies propelling the industry. Watch the recording here.

Professor Kristen Stilt in conversation with Elizabeth MeLampy ’21 during her presentation on animal festivals

EJIL:Talk!, the European Journal of International Law blog, published the “Heidelberg Declaration on Transforming Global Meat Governance.” Professor Stilt signed the declaration along with 16 other professors and scholars. The declaration is an output of the Defund Meat Conference hosted in January by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. The Max Planck Institute also maintains the declaration on its Defund Meat project webpage.

Vegan Recipes Requested

In response to concerns from students about a lack of plant-based options at Harvard Law School, the HLS Student Government and HALS are collaborating with Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) to expand plant-based dining offerings on campus. HALS invites you to submit your favorite recipe ideas so HUDS can consider including them in its menus. Please feel free to submit more than one recipe by submitting multiple responses to the Google Form.

Discussing Ecuador’s Estrellita Decision:

A conversation with the authoring judge

At the end of February, Judge Teresa Nuques Martínez, a judge for the Constitutional Court of Ecuador, visited ALPP to connect with Professor Stilt and Rights of Nature Fellow Macarena Montes Franceschini. Judge Nuques authored the decision in the “Estrellita Monkey” case, and she wanted to express personally how profoundly her life was changed by the amicus brief that ALPP, led by Professor Stilt and Macarena, co-authored with the Nonhuman Rights Project for the case. Six of the court’s eight other judges joined Judge Nuques on the majority opinion, which recognized Estrellita, who was a woolly monkey, as a subject of rights protected by the rights of nature.



During her visit with ALPP, Judge Nuques told Professor Stilt and Macarena that before the Estrellita case, and before receiving their amicus brief, she had given animals little consideration and certainly not moral or legal consideration. The amicus brief “shook” her. Judge Nuques said she was shocked to learn how socially and cognitively complex woolly monkeys are and that it was no longer possible for her to see animals as mere things or property. She described the diligence with which she worked on the case. Judge Nuques said she now not only lives with her first-ever animal companion but is committed to teaching animal law. As she stated, “there was a Teresa before the case and a Teresa after the case.”

February 15: Macarena virtually taught a class on animal rights jurisprudence at the International Centre for Animal Rights and Ethics.

February 26: Macarena was a guest lecturer on animal personhood and rights of nature for Professor David Dana’s Animal and Wildlife Law and Policy course at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

February 28: HALS hosted Christopher “Soul” Eubanks, founder of Apex Advocacy, a nonprofit focused on the intersections between animal rights and BIPOC-related social activism, for a lunch talk on “Black AND Green: An Introduction to Veganism, Speciesism, & Collective Liberation.” On the same day, HALS also hosted Jamie Berger, writer and producer of The Smell of Money, for a presentation on the impacts of pig farming in North Carolina on animals, communities, and the environment. Later in the day, HALS held a film screening of the award-winning documentary.

Recent Scholarship

Compendiums: The Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law & Policy published “Recent Developments in United States Animal Rights Law & Policy: 2024 Year-in-Review.” ALPP Legislative Policy Fellow Kelley McGill ’20 and Professor Stilt edited and synthesized the compendium of Brooks Animal Law Digest entries for the U.S. Edition, drafted in 2024 by Kelley and ALPP alumna Carney Anne Nasser.

The Brooks Institute concurrently published a 2024 compendium of the Canada Edition entries by Professor Angela Fernandez, Krystal-Anne Roussel, Kira Berkeley, and Ryann Fineberg.

Essay: Bonnie co-authored a short essay with Dale Jamieson, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at New York University, for a magazine of Carleton College. The essay is about a call for spiritual resilience amid the increasing effects of anthropogenic climate change and extinction. In it, the authors ask: “How can we survive and flourish in a world that we ourselves have created that threatens much of what we love and cherish?”

Book reviews: The Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law published Macarena’s book review of The legal recognition of animal sentience: Principles, approaches and applications, edited by Jane Kotzmann and MB Rodriguez Ferrere.

The ReVista Harvard Review of Latin America published a review authored by Macarena of the book The Amazon in Times of War by Marcos Colón.

CEQ Publishes Interim Rule Removing NEPA Regulations from CFR

USDA Announces New Bird Flu Strategy and Targets Proposition 12

Federal Court Strikes Down Wild Horse and Burro Cash Adoption Incentive Program

President Trump Seeks to Expand Public Land Logging via Use of ESA’s “God Squad”

DOJ Opens Antitrust Investigation into Egg Pricing

Your support makes this vital work possible. We invite you to deepen your ties to ALPC and ALPP through financial support. The Program and the Clinic are not sustained by the Law School, and our work relies on the generosity of our donors. We want to highlight the Clinic’s need in particular because the Clinic is not part of the Program’s endowment.

Please consider making a lasting impact through a donation. Please email ALPP Executive Director Nirva Patel if you would like to learn more about our vision and aims and how you may be able to support them. If you are able to give today, please click here to make a tax-deductible donation.